Chapter 13
The last Saturday before Christmas was the worst day of the year on the Hadley’s loading dock, and Caroline had been dreading it since October.
Every store in the city got its last big deliveries that week.
Every freight company in the region ran late.
And every year, somehow, three trucks from three different vendors showed up in the Sansom Street alley at the same hour, all trying to back into two bays, while the doors on Walnut Street opened at nine for the biggest shopping day of the season.
Last year a truck full of toys had sat in the alley for four hours.
A driver had screamed at Jamal. Caroline had spent the whole morning on the dock in a hard hat and the whole afternoon apologizing to the toy department.
So she set her alarm for five and took a cab from Fishtown in the dark, ready for war.
The cab turned into the alley at five-fifty.
Caroline leaned forward and looked through the windshield, and then she sat back and looked again.
The alley was quiet.
One truck was backed into bay one with its doors open.
Its ramp was down. A line of pallets was coming off it, smooth and fast, on two pallet jacks.
The second bay was empty and waiting, with its lights on.
There were no other trucks in the alley.
There was no honking. Nobody was screaming.
Snow was falling very lightly in the glow from the lamp over the dock, and Jamal was standing at the top of the ramp with a clipboard, whistling.
“This the right place?” the cab driver said.
“I don’t know,” Caroline said.
* * *
She climbed the steps to the dock in her boots.
Jamal saw her and grinned. “Morning, Mrs. B.”
“Jamal. What—” She looked around. “Where are the other trucks? DeLuca’s is supposed to be here at six. And the ornament people. And the toy truck.”
“Toy truck came at four-thirty. It’s already unloaded. It’s on two.” Jamal pointed at the freight elevator with his pen. “DeLuca’s is coming at seven now instead of six. Ornament people at eight. They’re all spaced out. Nobody’s waiting.”
“Who changed the times?”
Jamal’s grin slipped a little. He looked at his clipboard.
“And look at this,” Caroline said. She had walked over to the pallets coming off the truck.
Every single one had a big orange tag stapled to the plastic wrap.
FLOOR 2 — TOYS — BACK STOCK. FLOOR 1 — CANDY — FRONT.
FLOOR 3 — HOME — BAY C. “Who tagged these? We never tag them on the dock. We sort them upstairs. It takes all morning.”
“It’s faster this way,” Jamal said to his clipboard. “They go straight to the right floor. No sorting.”
“Jamal.”
He looked up.
“Who,” Caroline said.
Jamal took off his hat. He was twenty-two and six-foot-four and he looked, right then, about ten years old.
“A guy,” he said. “He was here when I got here. At four. He was out in the alley talking to the toy truck driver. He had a work jacket on, and a hat. He knew everything about trucks. Everything, Mrs. B. He got on the phone with the DeLuca’s dispatcher and moved their time like it was nothing.
He knew the dispatcher’s name.” Jamal turned his hat in his hands.
“He unloaded the toy truck himself. With me. The whole thing. And then he showed me how to do the tags. He said we should always do the tags.”
“Where is he now?”
“He left. Like ten minutes ago.” Jamal swallowed. “He said you’d come early. He said you’d ask. He said please don’t tell her who.”
Caroline stood very still on the dock.
“And he said,” Jamal added, very reluctantly, “if you made me, to tell you he’s just a guy who knows trucks.”
She turned around.
On the wall beside the dock door there was an old chalkboard.
The dock crew used it for the delivery schedule.
Last night, it had said what it always said the Saturday before Christmas, a mess of crossed-out times and arrows in three people’s handwriting.
Now it had been wiped clean. On it, in white chalk, in neat blocky capital letters, was a new schedule.
4:30 TOYS — BAY 1 — DONE 7:00 DELUCA’S — BAY 2 — DISPATCH: VINNIE 8:00 ORNAMENTS — BAY 1 10:30 GIFT WRAP — BAY 2 TAG EVERY PALLET BY FLOOR ON THE DOCK. SAVES 3 HRS.
Caroline knew those capital letters.
She had seen them on the refrigerator for nine years.
WENT FOR BAGELS, BACK IN 10. She had seen them on the birthday card he gave her every year, because he said his cursive looked like a seismograph.
She had seen them on the back of a sketch she’d given him on their first Christmas, where he’d written THE WINDOW DIRECTOR, 3 A.M.
She was down the dock steps and out in the alley before she’d decided to go.
The snow was coming down soft and slow. The alley was empty. At the far end, where it came out onto Twelfth Street, a set of red taillights was just turning the corner. It was a pickup truck. An old dark pickup truck, with snow on the roof.
Then it was gone.
Caroline stood in the middle of the alley in the snow for a long time.
* * *
The two new floor managers arrived at eight.
Caroline was on the mezzanine going over the Santa schedule when Luz brought them up.
They were a man and a woman, both in their fifties, both in black, both with the calm, flat faces of people who had worked the holiday floor at big stores for thirty years.
The man had run the Christmas floor at a Macy’s in New Jersey.
The woman had managed the holiday rush at a mall in King of Prussia for a decade before she retired.
“They’re from Keystone Staffing,” Luz said. “They’re here through Christmas Eve. They’ll take the ground floor and the second floor on the afternoon shifts.” She did not quite look at Caroline. “So you can go home before midnight.”
Caroline shook their hands. She thanked them. She sent them down to the floor with Homer to get their radios.
Then she turned to Luz.
“Who ordered them?”
“I did.”
“Luz.”
“I did.” Luz held up her tablet. The request form was on the screen. It was a Hadley’s staffing request. At the bottom, it had one signature. L. Ortega, Holiday Operations. “My name. My request. It came out of the holiday staffing budget.”
“We don’t have a holiday staffing budget. It was frozen in November. The board said there wasn’t any money for extra managers this year. I asked twice.”
“It wasn’t frozen by the board.” Luz put the tablet down. “It was frozen by Brittany. In November. Right after she wrote that plan. She put a hold on it from Mr. Bradshaw’s office. So the season would be harder on you.” Luz’s jaw tightened. “So you’d look tired.”
Caroline sat down slowly on the edge of her desk.
“And how,” she said, “did you find that out?”
Luz was quiet for a long moment. Then she took off her reading glasses and let them hang on their chain, which was what she did when she was about to say something she didn’t want to say.
“He called me,” Luz said. “On Monday night. After the Carols. After you told him to go home.”
Caroline didn’t move.
“He was sitting in his car on Walnut Street. I could hear the wipers.” Luz folded her arms. “And he said, Luz, I’m not going to ask you to tell her anything.
I’m not going to ask you to help me. He said, I just need to ask you one question, and I need you to give me the real answer.
” She looked at Caroline. “He said, What does she need? Not what I think she needs. Not what would look good. What does she actually need, this week, on that floor?”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him I’d think about it. And I hung up.” Luz shrugged one shoulder. “And then I thought about it. And on Wednesday I called him back.”
“Luz.”
“I told him three things,” Luz said. “I told him you needed two more floor managers, so you could go home before midnight for one week. I told him you needed somebody who knew what they were doing on the loading dock at four a.m. on the Saturday before Christmas, because last year it almost killed you. And I told him that if he sent you flowers, I would personally drive to his office and set them on fire.”
Caroline laughed. It came out of her without warning, cracked and wet.
“He didn’t send flowers,” she said.
“No.”
“And the managers? He paid for them?”
“No,” Luz said. “That’s the thing. He didn’t pay for anything.
He didn’t sign anything. When I told him about the managers, he was quiet for a second, and then he said, Luz, there’s money for that.
It’s in the holiday budget. Somebody froze it.
And he told me exactly where the hold was, and who put it there, and how to get it lifted.
” She tapped the tablet. “He said, It’s your floor too. Ask for it. In your name. Not mine.”
Caroline looked at the signature on the tablet. L. Ortega.
“So I asked for it,” Luz said. “And they gave it to me.”
Caroline sat on the edge of her desk and didn’t say anything for a long time.
It would have been so easy for him. That was what she kept thinking.
He could have picked up the phone and hired ten managers.
He could have hired fifty. He could have sent a truck full of flowers and a note in his handwriting and had Barry put out a statement about how the chairman was supporting the holiday staff.
It would have been nothing to him. It would have cost him less than a dinner.
And she could have refused it. She would have refused it. She would have sent every one of those managers home, and she would have worked until midnight all week out of pure spite.
He hadn’t given her anything she could refuse.
He had asked Luz what she needed, and then he had shut up and listened to the whole answer.
* * *
Her father came in at ten-thirty.
Caroline saw him from the mezzanine. He came in through the Walnut Street doors in his good camel hat and his dark overcoat, with his cane, and he stood just inside the doors for a moment and looked up at the dome the way he always did.
He was wearing a bow tie. It was red, with tiny green holly leaves on it, the one Caroline had given him for Christmas when she was fifteen.